HTC One KitKat update causing mono sound camcorder bug

HTC has steadily been rolling out its Android 4.4.2 KitKat update to original HTC One (M7) over the past month or so, but it looks like the update may have brought an issue or two along with it.

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Some users have been reporting that stereo audio isn’t working correctly when recording video via the HTC One camcorder app. Everything seems to work fine for the first video recorded after the update, but the following videos are then recorded with just the left audio channel rather than full stereo, making things rather hard to hear. Although this might seem like a hardware defect, rolling back to an earlier version will fix the problem, so don’t worry your hardware isn’t broken.

After testing the issue ourselves, we’ve found that the HTC software version 4.19.401.11 seems to be the culprit, that’s the Android 4.4.2 with Sense 5.5 update.

Whilst HTC hasn’t officially acknowledged the issue yet, there are a couple of workarounds that you can try if you are experiencing the problem. Rebooting your phone will reset the problem, meaning that you can record one video again before the sound issue reoccurs, but that’s not very convenient. The other solution is to trick the phone into resetting the way sound is captured, which can be done using Google Now.

After you capture your first video, which will have stereo sound, you will have to exit camera app. Then, open up Google now and click the Google voice button. It doesn’t matter if you say anything, as the button itself seems to activate both mics again. You can then go back into the camera app and record your second video in stereo. Unfortunately you’ll have to keep going back to Google Now for each new video that you want to record, but at least it’s faster than resetting your handset each time.

Hopefully HTC will resolve the issue quickly and will come up with a quick OTA patch for the problem. Until then, we’ll keep our eyes peeled for a more convenient temporary fix.